Burr was one of five senators who were investigated by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission for possible insider trading around the beginning of the pandemic in the United States. Senators Kelly Loeffler, Republican of Georgia; James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma; and Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, were acquitted in May. An investigation into Senator David Perdue, a Republican of Georgia, expanded to include transactions worth more than $ 1 million in a financial company, of which he was previously on the board, before being closed in August.
Mr. Burr remained open for more months.
Although he did not dispute that he sold much of his portfolio out of concern for the spread of the pandemic, he insisted that his business was based entirely on information released by financial news agencies in Asia, and not on special briefings he received as a senator.
Insider information use cases – particularly those involving lawmakers – are notoriously difficult to prove. Legislators, like any other citizen, can make investment decisions based on public information. According to the 2012 Stock Law, they are prohibited from making decisions based on specific non-public information that they access as senators.
The challenge for investigators is to extract public information from non-public information with sufficient confidence to prove that a legislator like Burr has acted with an unfair advantage over other investors. This is made even more difficult by the Constitution’s speech or the debate clause, which gives members of Congress unusual protections against investigators.
In that case, Burr’s sales came just days after a series of reports he received as a member of the Senate’s intelligence and health committees in late January and early February, focusing on the coronavirus threat. At the time, Trump and members of his party were minimizing the threat of the virus and, although it has spread widely in Asia, the pandemic has not yet affected much of American life or its financial markets.
Burr, who for a long time trained his attention to public health and warned about the threat of pandemics, clearly took this more seriously. On February 13, he sold 33 shares, worth $ 628,000 to $ 1.7 million, a large portion of his portfolio.
The moment allowed him to avoid losses that other investors suffered when the stock market contracted sharply in February and March. Financial markets have since recovered and are breaking records.
There were other costs for Mr. Burr along the way. He stood on the sidelines, for example, when the Intelligence Committee this summer delivered the final results of its year-long investigation into interference in the Russian elections in 2016 and ties to the Trump campaign. He oversaw the politically sensitive investigation from the start, working closely with the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, in the face of President Trump’s harsh objections, earning the respect of colleagues from both parties.